Thanks! I hadn't ever heard of the panta pump before. You are thinking that they could just be used on the overflow end of the peninsula and the far end could have nothing? That would be pretty nice, but I just wonder if that would be able to provide even flow to the far side of the tank. I have played around with watching flow after feeding a bunch of frozen mysys. When I have just pumps on one side, even at max, there is some sort of invisible barrier just past the middle of the tank, where instead of flowing to the opposite end, it curls down and back to where it started.
Being a noobie, of course I wanted some pulsing xenia and GSP. The xenia was given its own island and has exploded, and I have to say I really like it, it is mesmerizing to watch.
Now this sounds like a great bit of kit, I love my maxpect gyres and will look into this product. Does it have a port for battery backup at all?
What frozen phyto cubes will you be dosing that you mention in the illustration?So thanks to suggestions from R2R folks, my sump plans were finalized and I have placed the order with advancedacrylics.com for the custom build. The sump will be 1" rimless acrylic, according to them the largest rimless sump they have built and fourth largest overall. They estimate the build time to be 6-8 weeks. I am pumped!
A main goal with this sump is being able to have a massive yet automated/low-maintenance pod population, enough to feed a couple mandarins in the display. Everything I have read about pods indicates that to have a self-replenishing population, you need both phytoplankton and a safe water column for juvenile pods to eat the phyto and grow large enough to cling to structure.
Since the drum filter would mean certain death for free-swimming juveniles, I needed a way to keep them in, so I am going to try using a filter screen wall insert in the fuge with the same nylon mesh I used for the drum filter. That might also spread the already low suction across a much larger surface area.
But then the problem was, how to export adult pods if there is a screen in their way? Apparently adult pods love to colonize loofahs (the shower sponge thingies), so I am going to try motorizing a nightly loofah transport up/out of the fuge and down into the return. Loofthansa!
Watch Reefgrrl's AMAZING video on this. Get a $50 bottle of concentrated phyto, and use small ice cube trays to portion it out into doses. It stays good 2 YEARS in the freezer, and the bottle has enough to dose 100 gal of water well over a year. And dosing it is so incredibly simple.
uniquecorals.com
I can't really say how it would compare, but I know that I wouldn't be able to keep up with culturing my own phyto on top of everything else. But I can toss an ice cube into the sump every couple days. If frozen is close and produces results, that is good enough for me.
The thought process with the luffa isn't to establish anything -- the goal is a repeatable way to "dose adult pods" that have grown in the fuge into the display.
Something like this. One stepper raises and lowers, another slides it along horizontally to and from the return. It is not transporting them to the display, it is transporting them about a foot over the fuge chamber to the return chamber to get sucked into the pump and then up to the display. I plan to play with a baffle to channel the water through the loofa when it is in the return section to loosen pods on their way to the pump.
